Friday, November 30, 2012

97% of Teachers are Rated as Effective- Why is everyone in a hurry to change the system?

You go to a teacher college and student teach for free. An unpaid internship for a semester or longer awaits you and if you are lucky, you are hired out of a hiring pool of most likely 1,000-2,000 applicants and maybe ten people are interviewed for a scant few openings. You are the best of the best most personnel directors would like to think. The thing is, some in The Lansing Department of Education (DOE) would like to change the perception that 97% are effective in the classroom. This figure is derived from data compiled by the DOE where administrators evaluate teachers and make almost everyone mildly or highly effective. When everyone passes according to Lansing, why evaluate teachers at all. In a story by the Detroit Free Press, they break down how teacher evaluations will occur as soon as next year.

A first look at how effective teachers are across the state
provides a clear picture of just how far school districts must go to
have strong evaluation systems in place that give teachers the kind of
feedback they need to improve.
The new state data find that
about 97% of the state's 96,000 teachers were rated effective or highly
effective during the 2011-12 school year -- the first year districts
had to assign one of four ratings to teachers. Those ratings were:
highly effective, effective, minimally effective or ineffective.
Some
of the state's worst-performing schools doled out favorable ratings to
teachers: 48 of the state's 146 priority schools -- so named because
they are in the bottom 5% academically -- rated all of their teachers in
the top two categories. Several said all of their teachers were highly
effective.Related content
• How does your school rate its teachers' effectiveness? Search this database
• PDF:Report on need for smart teacher evaluation in Michigan (2.1 MB)
• PDF:Michigan Dept. of Education report on teacher effectiveness ratings
But state data also show that more teachers in priority schools were rated in the bottom categories than other schools.
The
data isn't surprising given that it was the first year districts had to
report the effectiveness ratings, said Jan Ellis, spokeswoman for the
Michigan Department of Education.
The ratings will likely change, she said, "once there's a more common system and a common measurement."
That
common system will come via the work of the Michigan Council for
Educator Effectiveness, a panel working to develop a statewide system
for evaluating educators, as well as guidelines for districts that opt
to develop their own systems.
The fact that few teachers were rated ineffective makes the work of the council crucial, experts say.
It
tells the council "that districts need a lot of support and assistance
in how to move forward," said Sandi Jacobs, vice president and managing
director of state policy for the National Council on Teacher Quality.
That
point is also illustrated in a report the Education Trust-Midwest
released today. It analyzed the evaluation systems in 28 school
districts and found few of the systems met a set of standards they say
research indicates are necessary for a strong system.
"All of them
fell short on at least one component. Many fell short on all of them,"
said Drew Jacobs, a data and policy analyst for the Education
Trust-Midwest, a Royal Oak-based nonprofit education policy
organization.
Among those standards: having annual observations;
using state test data in evaluating teachers for whom the data is
available; providing specific directions on how to score all criteria
that teachers are evaluated on, and having a sophisticated observation
process.
The observation process -- in which an evaluator comes
into a teacher's classroom to observe -- is where schools tend to
struggle, said Robert Floden, co-director of the Education Policy Center
at Michigan State University.
What's missing, he said, are
resources. Teachers should be observed multiple times by an evaluator,
but that's often difficult given the amount of time that goes into
multiple observations.
"The system we have -- and Michigan is not
unique -- says it's really important ... but the system does not invest
resources in making that happen," Floden said.
Those resources are crucial, however.
"In
order for this to have the kind of impact educators and families want
to see ... there needs to be a significant amount of investment so
teachers really benefit and grow as educators," said Nate Walker, a
policy analyst at the American Federation of Teachers-Michigan. Contact Lori Higgins: 313-222-6651 or lhiggins@freepress.com